do you? why not add your miracles too?

Monthly Archives: November 2013

Having completed all the temple requirements for a first-born male child, the happy little family settled down in the town of Nazareth, Galilee. Jesus grew up strong, he was full of wisdom and God gifted him in all sorts of ways.

One year when the family was making their annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the Passover Festival, Joseph and Mary lost Jesus. They headed home, thinking Jesus was among the group they travelled with. He was 12 years old at the time, so that seemed likely. They went for a day without seeing him. Then they started to look for him and couldn’t find him with any of their friends or relatives, because he had stayed behind in Jerusalem. So they backtracked and looked for him all the way to Jerusalem.

Three days later, they found him in the temple courtyard, calmly sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. The people gathered around were amazed at his level of understanding and how he responded to the teachers. When his parents spotted him, they were dumbfounded.

“Why did you do this to us, Jesus,” Mary asked. “Your father and I have been frantically searching for you for three days!”

Jesus replied, “Well, I don’t know why. You should have known that I would be in my Father’s house.”

This went right over Mary and Joseph’s head, but Mary filed it away in her heart’s memory. Then they left again to return to Nazareth, and in the future, Jesus was careful to do as his parents asked and expected.

Jesus grew bigger and wiser, and had a good rapport and reputation within the community, and with God.

One night after the visit of the eastern dignitaries, Joseph had a dream in which an angel said to him, “Get up and take Mary and the child and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you otherwise, because Herod is out to find and kill the child.”

Joseph wasted no time doing just as he had been instructed in the dream; he left in the middle of that very night for Egypt.

Eventually, Herod realized that the eastern dignitaries had outsmarted him and weren’t coming back, and he was furious. He ordered the slaughter of all boys two years old and under in the town of Bethlehem and its vicinity. He had estimated the age of the child according to what the dignitaries had said. On that day, something the prophet Jeremiah had written hundreds of years earlier came to pass: “In Ramah, Rachel can be heard crying her heart out in mourning for her children. There’s no consoling her because they are no more.”

Joseph, Mary and the child stayed in Egypt until Herod died. Then Joseph had another dream in which an angel told him, “Get up and take Mary and the child back to Israel. The people who had it out for him are dead now.”

Joseph again did as he had been instructed and got up and took Mary and the child back to Israel. This fulfilled another ancient prophecy: “I called my son out of Egypt.”

When Joseph found out that Herod’s son Archelaus presided over Judea in place of his father, he feared returning there. In yet another dream, he was warned against it, so he set out for the district of Galilee instead. He settled in a town called Nazareth, fulfilling yet another ancient prophecy which had predicted that Jesus would be called a Nazarene.